Snapchat may be bringing commerce options for publishers

Security and privacy aren’t the only problems of Facebook these days. Relationships with publishers have also been fraught, given that the social network has been pushing more content from users’ friends rather than brands and publishers. Snapchat is reportedly seeing this as an opportunity to build their own relationship with publishers disenchanted with Zuckerberg and his company right now. Reports are saying they are testing out a commerce function with some of their Snapchat Discover publishers and that they will be offering it to more publishers soon.

If you’re a heavy Snapchat user and you also view the Discover section a lot, then you’ve probably seen some posts from publishers that let you swipe up if you want to buy one of their products from a recently launched Store within the section. The store actually also contains Snap merchandise like sweatshirts and hats and except for those, Snapchat will reportedly not take any cut from revenues of the publishers in the Store.

CEO Evan Spiegel has previously said that content is one of the top three priorities of the brand for 2018 and so they will need incentives for publishers to not just be on the platform but also to spend on advertising. Offering them commerce opportunities is one way to do that, and the company has also been quoted as saying commerce is going to be one of the things they will focus on this year. They have also set branded content guidelines for the first time ever, to give clearer direction for advertisers and also to help users distinguish between organic content and branded content / ads.

In Snapchat’s year-end report, they paid more than $100 million to Discover content partners, so having commerce will be another boon for those wanting to have some sort of revenue for the content they’re producing. No official statement yet from Snapchat so let’s wait and see.